I approached the novel with the prejudices of a generation saturated with clichés about hippies and, coming from Mexico, only a vague idea of what the 60’s and 70’s where actually like in the US. I also was weary about the subject, what for me has turned into a sign of the cultural hegemony of empire. By the time I finished the novel, though, I was left with a feeling of surprise... and defeat. That was refreshing, that combination.
Kerson’s novel is not defeatist, incidentally. On the contrary, it’s a very joyful one, fast, brimming with both powerful and delightful sensorial images and ideas. The defeatist part for me was the context and the historical result of the struggles of the time, the more general analysis made a posteriori apropos the 50th anniversary of May 68, last year. Eurocentric, or empire-centric, as the analysis tends to be, the date did provide an excuse to personally engage with the recent history of Nuestra América, the history of what I consider my land, my people: revolutions in Guatemala, Cuba and Nicaragua, the Chilean and Argentinean experiments in socialism, the social upheaval in Mexico, and the counter-insurgency orchestrated and paid for by the Us government, supported by local elites, the murderous repression and persecution, political assassination and terrorism of the state. I read the novel in that context, and thus the defeatist overtone I had at the end. But I was also surprised at how lively it was, and it helped me lessen the fatalism that pervades my own thinking. A bridge to another place and other people, to enlarge the picture I have of what was going on in those decisive decades.
The novel thus became an occasion to revise that particular part of history, the extraordinary everyday of the time in the US. That in itself makes it a relevant account, but the novel is good on its own. It’s like juicy slice of experimental theater and communal life, sandwiched by two noir and tragic, unsettlingly bucolic chapters. It’s playful, fun, experimental, dramatic, and it doesn’t shy away from criticism. For me it’s the closest thing I’ve read to a first-hand account of young artists struggling at that time, grappling with the questions of the age: overt political participation of the masses, the anti-war movement, sex, drugs, and the un-Holy Trinity of our stratified society: racism, sexism and imperialism. The novel is so damn sensual, there’s a gushing flow of stimuli all throughout it, a dramatic push towards experimentation, a sensitivity craftily put down in what I can only describe as verbal scene re-enactments done powerfully descriptively by Kerson. I think there resides the strength of the text: it brings forth the sheer willingness of a small group of artists to experience, to engage wholly with the world, revolted by the injustices of their socio-political context, up in revolt themselves, using the tools and talents they have. A new world that struggles to be born, and an old world that is not yet dead, pushing back violently, to paraphrase that famous Italian.
The novel presents a vivid picture of the oozing creativity and inventiveness of the theater company, full of complex and endearing characters, and the challenges they face to make themselves heard, their contradictions, and the challenges of living together in communes. I refuse to believe that it’s just naïve to want to live fully, to be a decisive part of history, to imagine and believe in another world, in other ways of relating to one another, in other ways and purposes for organizing; and Kerson doesn’t seem to believe that, either. I remember I thought while I was reading, “These people really thought it was possible; they even believed they were doing it!” And why not? Why wouldn’t they? We need precisely that! It’s also very refreshing that the novel boldly shows the counter-arguments to guerrilla theater project. A merciless critique of how it was done, a scrutiny of the privileged position of its characters, mainly white, mainly well-schooled, the patriarchal relationships that pervade the relationship of the participants. And the apparent insignificance of engaging in a more or less isolated project with the purpose of disrupting the status quo, of posing to an unknown public the questions that shook them up, via infiltrative theater interventions in a big city. At the risk of sounding arrogant and obviously with hindsight, what infiltrative theater missed in the 60’s and 70’s is that the status quo is the real disruption. The mainstream, what is repeated over and over as normality, is profoundly disturbing, unsettling, destructive, corrosive. Against this background, the experiments of the troupe, their strengths and weaknesses, still talk to us, to my generation. The novel touches upon subjects that are still unresolved, problems that have worsened, and offers no solutions. It is instead a mirror image, as contemporary as ever. I can see myself, our present struggles, in theirs, and in their failure. How important that is, damn it. And in spite of my own defeatist reading, there’s the proverbial ray of hope, a phrase that still resonates in my head after a month of reading it: “a theater to create the images we need.” That’s awesome and true. We’ll keep on doing it.
